


and we will find ourselves underneath a new sun

by basset_voyager



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Jedi Leia Organa, Post-OT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 09:59:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14446836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager/pseuds/basset_voyager
Summary: “Leia, it’s not something to be afraid of,” he says. Whether he means the weapon or the Force in general, Leia isn’t certain. She rolls her eyes, but reaches out and takes the saber from him. It’s just an object. The metal is warm from Luke’s hand.[Leia, after the war.]





	and we will find ourselves underneath a new sun

The first lightsaber Leia ever picks up is Luke’s. Not the blue one that Luke inherited from their father; that one was lost on Bespin when Vader sliced off the hand that held it. Instead, it’s the green one that Luke built for himself, afterwards. He holds it out to her one day when they’re on a walk together during a visit to the new settlement on Yavin 4, not long after the Concordance. No preamble, no explanation. As if she’s asked for it, and he’s obliging. 

“I’ve told you I prefer a blaster,” she says. 

He smiles that smile he picked up sometime during the war, the one that makes him look years older than he is. 

“Leia, it’s not something to be afraid of,” he says. Whether he means the weapon or the Force in general, Leia isn’t certain. She rolls her eyes, but reaches out and takes the saber from him. It’s just an object. The metal is warm from Luke’s hand. 

Luke looks down at his boots, and Leia looks at his face, open and serious and more precious than she ever could have prepared for. She knows he wants to share this with her, that the idea of shouldering this burden alone terrifies him. But something tells her that learning to be a Jedi in order to make Luke happy would be doing it for the wrong reasons. 

“Just hold onto it for me, alright?” he says. “For a couple of hours. See how it feels.” 

She waits until he’s out of sight to ignite it, worried she’ll look silly. A breeze makes its way through the branches above her as the saber comes to life in her hands, humming and crackling. The blade is supposed to be weightless, but she can feel it, somehow. It pulls at something inside her. All of a sudden, she is distinctly aware of the fact that she could fell the gnarled old tree next to her in one swing. Its years of growth, destroyed in a single burning moment. With this weapon, she could cut through stormtroopers like they were butter. The _something_ inside her swells, and her head spins. 

Leia leaves the saber next to Luke’s bed and spends the rest of the day walking alone. 

.

Han tries to understand Leia’s connection to the Force, but Leia can tell that he struggles with it. Sometimes, Leia will wake up in the middle of the night after sharing a dream with Luke – the hills of Alderaan always turn to desert, and there’s a woman whose face neither of them can see, and then someone is falling into a chasm, down down down into nothingness – and she slips out of bed and down the hall to the Falcon’s galley. Han always follows her. They have caf, and he teases her weakly about how she acts so tough but still takes her caf with sugar and cream. She doesn’t take the bait like she usually would, and they end up sitting in silence. He holds her hand so tightly it almost hurts, as if by increasing the intensity of the gesture he can make up for its inadequacy. 

“The war is over,” Han says one night, apropos of nothing. Leia wonders why she keeps feeling like she’s missed the beginnings of conversations. She sips her caf. 

“I’m not sure it is,” she replies. 

“Look,” Han says. “I wouldn’t know the Force if it punched me in the teeth, you know that, but I think I know you. You’re too stubborn not to follow things through to the end. You’ve got to get a handle on – whatever this is. And if anybody’s cut out to follow Luke on his damned crazy mission – ” 

“I think I might be pregnant,” she interrupts him. 

There’s a long stretch of silence during which Han’s mouth slowly drops open. Leia bites her lip. She’d been planning to tell him later, when she was more certain, but it slipped out. They haven’t been planning this, not really. She wanted to break it to him gently so they could both get used to the idea. Han’s eyebrows knit together.

“Should – should you be drinking caf?” he asks. 

There’s a pause, and then Han is cringing at himself as Leia starts to laugh. She’ll make fun of Han for this for years, so much that Ben will roll his eyes whenever it comes up. _So, I tell him I’m pregnant, and this moof-milker looks at me dead serious and says…_ For now, it’s just the two of them, putting their hands over their mouths to stifle their giggles even though the only other person on the ship is Chewbacca, who sleeps like a rock. If some of their tears aren’t exactly from laughing, neither of them says anything about it. 

“Shut up,” Han says, as if he isn’t laughing too. Then: “You mean it?” Leia nods. 

Han exhales and runs his fingers through his hair. He’s grinning. 

“Frag. How’s a kid gonna deal with us?” he sighs. 

Leia shakes her head. “I guess we’ll find out.” 

Han forgets about the Force and the Jedi for the rest of the night, amped on caffeine and the prospect of fatherhood. They talk idly about how they’re going to juggle an infant with the demands of the New Republic and the pros and cons of Chewie as a babysitter. She needles him a little about acting so tough but melting at the idea of making a small squishy person. He looks at her like he hasn’t seen her in years. It occurs to her that even though they never talked about it, neither of them really believed they’d make it out of the war, let alone have a family of their own. 

Leia tries to push her bad feeling to the back of her mind. She doesn’t want to ruin Han’s good mood, or start a fight, and it would sound stupid out loud anyway. Still, the question rattles at the bottom of her thoughts like a loose bolt: _what if I carry it, whatever it is that made things go so horribly wrong?_ After all, Obi-Wan picked Luke to watch over and train, not her, and nobody has ever explained to her why. He might have sensed something, something bad in her that Luke – sweet, noble, stupid Luke – can’t see. 

She wonders, more than once, what Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber might have felt like in her hands.

. 

She’s been angry her whole life. First at the endless aunts who tried to mold her into some sort of quiet little princess, then, once she discovered she was adopted, at her parents for telling her so little about where she came from. Later, she was angry at the Empire for bleeding Alderaan of all its resources and giving them only more taxes and violence and famine in return. Angry at the ineffectual Senate, at the perfect Republic her Papa remembered for failing, at the nagging call within her to _do_ something that seemed as if it could never be satisfied. 

Jedi are not angry. She knows this. They are serene, balanced. Her father – Papa, she means – managed to save two or three Jedi texts from the purge, and she would sneak into his office to read them over and over again as a child. She was drawn to the descriptions of great knights who drew on the power of the universe to topple all evil. _There is no death, only the Force._

She asks Luke to teach her to meditate. 

“This doesn’t mean I want to learn anything else,” she assures him. 

He smiles. “Okay.” 

“I’m serious.” 

“I believe you.” 

They sit next to each other on the roof of the new apartment building she and Han are staying in on Coruscant. It’s surprising, or perhaps not surprising at all, how easily their breaths fall into rhythm with each other. That night, they dream together again, of the blue lightsaber that was lost and a man in the snow with a gash across his face. 

. 

Leia spends weeks digging through what remains of the Republic archive for any record of her birth mother. It’s hard enough figuring out who she was at all. Obi-Wan and the Organas must have known her name, but they took it to the grave. Even Luke knows nothing about her, though anything Owen and Beru told him would likely have been untrue regardless. Leia feels a stab of frustration about that. No one should have had the right to keep any of this from them. No one should have – and her throat catches as the truth of the thought hits her for the first time – no one should have had the right to separate them. Obi-Wan must have known what it would mean to stretch their connection across light-years, a fraying thread they both could feel without consciously knowing it was there. It was unnatural, to be apart. 

And what kind of person was this woman, this mother, anyway? Did she know what kind of man Vader was? Did he trick her? Were they together, or was it a passing affair? Or – something worse? 

Leia is almost grateful when a wave of morning sickness hits her and she has to run to the refresher to vomit. She sits on the floor with her forehead against the cool wall, trying to breathe steadily. Luke never seems to worry about these things. Somehow, he’s able to make peace with all of it. Leia laughs humorlessly to herself. She’s never been at peace with anything in her entire life. 

But she’s never given up on anything, either, and the truth can’t be worse than her imagination. So she picks herself up and goes back to searching. 

At first, she thinks it’s possible no documents exist. After all, most holonet records of the Jedi have long ago been scrubbed. They might as well be a myth, which must have been what Emperor Palpatine wanted. All that’s left now are the files people managed to save beforehand and ancient flimsi books like the ones Papa had. 

As she sifts through old Senate session records to see if she can catch a glimpse of Obi-Wan or Anakin Skywalker, she stumbles on a speech given in one of the early debates over the Military Creation Act. It’s credited to a senator from Naboo, but the details have been removed. It’s late, and Leia’s head hurts from combing through so much material, but she tells herself she’ll look at one last thing before giving up for the night. The holovid is blurry, and there are large chunks of it missing, but there’s something familiar about the woman in it. It must be her style of dress, which is quintessentially Naboo at the turn of the age: flowing velvet and silk in blues and deep purples. Mom – Breha – took Leia on a few of her formal visits to Naboo when she was little, and she remembers being fascinated by the elaborate regalia of the court. Leia liked Naboo, the way the domed universities and temples never quite overtook the dominance of the jungle. It was a world of learning, like Alderaan, but something in it felt wild and untamable. Leia had always felt at home there. 

“We are nothing if we are divided against ourselves. Democracy is not won with a fist. The honorable senator from Ryloth would you have believe that the creation of this army is not an act of war,” the woman is saying. “However, to make such a statement is to deny the reality – ” Her voice cuts out and is replaced by static. It takes it about ten seconds to come back. 

“ – die in this conflict, but many more will be displaced, or will die of famine or disease. We must consider – ” The sound cuts out again and the image flickers. 

“You’re a kriffing prophet, lady,” Leia mutters to herself. She moves to shut off the holovid, but then the picture returns to show the Naboo senator shaking hands with her allies, and she recognizes one of the other figures. He doesn’t have the gray in his beard that Leia remembers, and his smile is hopeful in a way she’s never seen, but there’s no mistaking him. Bail Organa clasps the woman’s shoulder and nods at something she says. His eyes crinkle when he smiles.

Leia doesn’t realize she’s reached out to try to touch the recording until her hand goes through his chest. She hasn’t seen an image of her parents since Alderaan, hasn’t let herself. Papa talks to the other senator, and though there’s no sound, she can imagine his voice. He’s probably saying something like: _If we band together, we cannot fail._

The recording ends, and both Papa and the woman disappear. Leia sits alone in the darkened library and cries until she can’t cry anymore. 

When she gets home, long past midnight, she finds the apartment empty. Sighing, she puts her jacket back on and walks down to the docks, where the Falcon is waiting. Sure enough, there's Han, curled up in the pilot's seat like a child, asleep. She feels suddenly guilty; Han hates sleeping in their bed alone, and he probably tried to comm her more than once tonight. They'll fight about it in the morning, she knows. _Why are you even with me if you don't trust me to help you?_

"You might be right about this one, but don't get a big head about it," she whispers, and kisses him on the forehead. He stirs but doesn't wake. 

She tiptoes over to the galley to make a cup of caf. It'll be hell in the morning if she doesn't get any sleep, but she'd rather not dream. 

.

The New Republic is endless meetings and committees and compromises and knowing when to smile and who to be seen with. Leia grew up in this world; she should be at home in it. Instead, her fingers twitch against her side to grasp at the blaster she now leaves in her speeder. People expect to see the last survivor of the House of Organa in Alderaani white, and she cannot disappoint, but the collar of her robe chokes her. It all reminds her of the endless royal functions of her childhood. If she were still thirteen, she would unbraid her hair, put on her worst dress, and lurk around the university until she found someone to pick a fight with. But she isn’t thirteen, and the university is gone. 

“What if we went away?” she asks Han one night, her mouth against his shoulder. 

“What do you mean?” he says without opening his eyes. 

She props herself up on her elbow. “I mean, if we got in the Falcon and just flew away from here. Raised the kid somewhere quiet and let all these politicians sort themselves out.” 

Han smiles the crooked smile he thinks is so charming, the one Leia has always thought makes him look like a goof. 

“I think we’d be bored,” he replies. 

“Maybe,” Leia murmurs. 

Han shimmies downward in the bed so he can rest his head on her stomach. She pushes his hair back from his forehead with her hand, and he sighs, tracing a freckle on her hip with his index finger. 

“We’re gonna do fine,” he tells her. “Well, when I say fine, I mean I’m sure we’ll do everything wrong and mess up the kid beyond repair, but that’s what parents are _for,_ right – ”

“Oh, shut up – ”

“ – It builds character or something – ”

Leia flicks Han lightly on the forehead and sticks her tongue out at him. He laughs, and she feels his smile against her stomach. 

“We’re going to get _old_ ,” she says, and wrinkles her nose. 

“Nah.” Han turns his face to look at her, grinning. “I fully intend to get killed by something long before I become a crusty old geezer.” 

Leia makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “Like hell you are. As much as you might like to, you do _not_ get to escape this child’s teen years by getting yourself flushed out of an airlock.” 

“Damn. Thought I had the perfect plan.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” She pulls his face to hers to kiss him, and he laughs into her mouth. 

The Senate has passed a resolution to reset the calendar by the Battle of Yavin, which makes it only year 5. The galaxy is young all over again.

In the morning, Leia puts the white robe away in a box and stands in front of the mirror in her underwear. She runs her hand over her stomach. 

.

Leia visits Luke at his new Jedi temple, nestled at the bottom of a valley on an Outer Rim world orbiting a binary star. If you ask him why he picked it, he’ll tell you that the Force told him it was the right choice. Privately, Leia wonders if the sunsets remind him of his childhood. Luke erects his temple at the edge of a river, at the spot where the base of a mountain gives way to rolling meadow. Sunshowers blow through the fields in the mornings. 

Leia hangs in the back of the training area, her arms crossed over her growing belly. Every once in awhile, Luke catches her eye and smiles at her. He’s been glowing ever since she arrived, as if he were the one pregnant instead of her. She wonders if he ever gets sick when she does. 

“Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them,” he’s telling his younglings. “Instead, reach out with your feelings.” 

With his brown robes and new sandy beard, Luke looks to her like a young Obi-Wan. Still, when he laughs – and he laughs more these days, surrounded by his students and new friends – Leia can see the teenage boy from Tatooine who came barrelling into her cell on the Death Star. She’d been lying there, trying her best to be brave knowing her family was gone, and suddenly there he was: _I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you!_ She hadn’t thought _thank Creation._ What she’d thought was, _hey,_ I’m _the brave young hero here, mister. There’s not room for two of us_. 

Leia slips away from the training session and walks down to the river. The suns are setting over the foothills, spilling pink and purple into the sky. Luke will do well here. She can feel it. If she told Luke that, he’d get that look on his face, that you-have-that-power-too-Leia look. He still hasn’t given up on her learning to use the Force, even though he knows she’s never levitated anything in her damn life and has a habit of falling asleep while meditating. Yoda told him she would learn. That’s enough for him. 

A breeze plays with her hair as she closes her eyes. When she opens them, something’s moving on the other side of the river. There’s a flash of white, and her first instinct is _stormtrooper_. Her hand is halfway to her hip before she remembers that she doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. She takes a deep breath and squeezes her hand into a fist to stop it shaking, then squints into the gathering twilight. 

“Hello?” she calls across the water. The opposite bank isn’t very far away here, only about twenty feet, but the river flows quickly. She makes out the swirl of a long gown in the wind. There are people on this planet other than Luke’s Jedi, she knows, but they’re small and most of their settlements are west of here where the land is less wild. 

“Hello?” she says again, and steps forward to the very edge of the bank. The figure is human, she realizes, a woman in a fan headdress with cascading white beads. Her gown is layered with wide sleeves and thick embroidery, and she wears white makeup with red on her cheeks and lips. She belongs in a Naboo throne room, not on a riverbank on a planet in the Outer Rim. Leia finds herself wading into the water, which rushes past her legs, threatening to knock her over and pull her downstream. A voice in the back of her head tells her that this is strange, that it doesn’t make sense, but it’s overpowered by her need to get to the woman on the other side of the river, to touch her, to ask her something, anything. To get that impassive face to break into a smile.

“I’m coming,” Leia calls out. All those clothes must be so heavy and hard to move in. The thought circles around and around in Leia’s mind as she wades further into the water, which comes up to her knees, then her hips, then the bottom of her swollen middle. She should be knocked over, she should be pulled helplessly to wherever the river wants to take her, but instead she keeps moving forward. Pushing onward as the water comes up past her navel, then starts to descend again, just ten more feet, seven. The woman is still looking past Leia, through her –

“Leia?” 

Leia turns around at the sound of her name. It’s Luke, standing on the riverbank. He looks worried, and for a moment she can’t figure out why. She turns back to look at the woman in the headdress, but there’s nobody there. There aren’t even any footprints in the mud. The water is cold, she realizes. 

“I saw – ” she starts to say, and then bursts into tears.

Luke and Leia walk back to the temple together. He gets her some dry clothes, and they sit under the stars with their backs against the cool stone. 

“Maybe it was a Force ghost,” Luke says. 

She shakes her head. “You always describe Force ghosts as fuzzy holograms. This...it looked real.” 

“You might be stronger in this part of the Force than me.”

“Bantha shit.” 

“I’m serious.” 

“I’m pregnant, Luke,” Leia says. “I’m hormonal, I’m emotional, I’m stressed because of work on top of it…”

Luke shakes his head. “Doesn’t mean you should ignore what you’re feeling.” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easy for you to say.” 

She puts her head on his shoulder, and they play invent-a-constellation until the planet’s moon is high in the sky. Leia used to do that by herself, looking out her bedroom window when she was little. He was playing it with her, even then, halfway across the galaxy. Kriff, she should comm Han. It’ll be good to hear his voice.

“I can’t be a Jedi, Luke,” she murmurs. “Jedi don’t have partners or children. And Jedi in politics is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.” 

“You hate politics. Besides, it’s a new galaxy. Maybe we don’t need all the old laws anymore,” Luke says. 

The Jedi texts Leia read as a child said that through the Force, all things become clear. Through the Force, all things move together. Only when you let go of your attachments and flow with the river will you find peace. 

“If this was a test, I clearly failed it,” Leia says. 

Luke shrugs. “So?”

.

When Leia gets home, she has tea with her old Senate ally Pooja Naberrie, ostensibly to discuss the pros and cons of a rotating capital for the New Republic. Really, it’s mostly an excuse to sit at Pooja’s kitchen table and talk about old times.

“The Rebellion was so exciting back then, wasn’t it?” Pooja muses. “Almost like a game. I don’t think it sunk in for me how dangerous it really was until much later.” 

“I know. I thought I was invincible,” Leia says. 

Pooja laughs. “I certainly thought you were. The kid princess who’d lead us all to a new dawn.” 

Leia makes a show of rolling her eyes. 

“Call me a princess again,” she teases, “and I’m pouring my tea in your lap.” 

“On Naboo, a princess is an elected official,” Pooja reminds her. 

Naboo. Leia stares at the dregs of the tea in her cup. 

“Pooja. Can I tell you something strange?” 

She describes the woman she saw by the river, and how she waded into the water to get to her only for her to disappear. Pooja listens with a deepening frown of concentration. When Leia finishes, she’s silent for several long moments.

“It seems like you saw Shiraya,” Pooja finally says. “The moon goddess. People, women in particular, are supposed to have visions of her in times of transition. But she’s a Naboo goddess. I have no idea why you would have seen her all the way out there.”

Leia leans back in her chair, remembering the crackling image in the library and – to avoid thinking about Bail, she tells herself – she asks: “Do you know who the Senator for Naboo was when the Old Republic fell?” 

_We are nothing if we are divided against ourselves, the woman says, and she looks not angry but utterly sad._ Pooja frowns. 

“Padmé Amidala,” she answers. “She was my aunt, but she died when I was seven. There used to be a statue of her in Theed, of when she was Queen, but the Empire tore it down during the occupation.” 

Leia shakes her head. “How did she die?” 

Pooja leans back in her chair. 

“We never got a definitive answer,” she says. “At least, none that my mother saw fit to tell the children. She was twenty-seven, and one day she was just gone. People at home can be a bit superstitious about it, actually, because she died just as Palpatine came to power. What actually happened is probably that Palpatine had her killed. Why do you ask?”

Leia shrugs. “I was just going through some old files recently and saw a speech that she gave.” 

There’s a feeling stirring at the back of Leia’s mind, like a shiver, or a light hand between her shoulder blades that gently pushes her forward. She hates it. How does Luke stand the way the Force wants to take you over, to push and pull you in whatever direction it wants? 

“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Padmé,” Pooja goes on. “Her public persona was very stoic, but she could be so much fun, and she was really good with me when I was little. She always called me on my birthday and brought me things from Coruscant. Her private life was quite unconventional. She had this Jedi friend who, looking back, I’m reasonably certain was her lover. Anyway, her career really inspired me growing up. She helped form the early structures of the Alliance. I’m surprised your parents never talked about her.” 

Leia grips her cup so tightly that the porcelain becomes slippery with sweat. 

“In my vision of – of Shiraya,” she says, “I, uh. I couldn’t get her to look at me. She wouldn’t look at me. What does that mean?” 

“I don’t know, Leia.” Pooja reaches out and takes Leia’s hand. “Are you alright?” 

They haven’t even talked about the upcoming vote. Leia rubs her eyes with her other hand. The baby is kicking. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

. 

In her dreams, there is another woman, plain-faced and squinting into the Tatooine dawn. Leia follows her gaze to the wavering desert horizon, which is empty save a cluster of squat buildings in the distance ( _Tosche_ , her mind provides), and the rising suns. A speeder appears and vanishes. The woman shields her eyes with her hand as she watches it go. 

“Who are we waiting for?” Leia asks, but the woman doesn’t answer, just keeps watching, as the wind whips her tunic and the twin suns quiver against the ground. 

.

She goes to Naboo. It's the height of the wet season, and the canals are swollen up to their breakers, the domes streaked dark with rain. The imperial flags have come down, but Leia knows enough to see the Empire’s influence everywhere: twenty-year-old blaster burns on the outside of buildings, blank walls that once held mosaics, children chattering in Basic instead of the languages of their parents. It will never be the same, this city. The jungles, however, still bloom, and the rain still falls. Underneath the water, the Gungans still tend to their own affairs. They led the most effective resistance against the empire on the planet, Leia has read. The Empire’s bias towards humans in their military left them disadvantaged against an amphibious people. Now, Leia sees more Gungans above water than she remembers seeing as a child. Another legacy of the Empire, or maybe something that would have happened anyway; it's difficult to know. It makes her wonder how Alderaan might have changed, if it still could. 

It takes over two hours for Leia to find the house she's looking for. She doesn't use a holomap. Instead, for the first time, she lets the Force guide her to where she needs to go. In the center of Theed, the temple of Shiraya has been reopened, its ramparts draped with flowers the size of Leia’s fist. Leia stops for a moment to listen to the drumming from inside, then moves on, through the circuitous streets. The rain starts again, and by the time she finds herself in front of an ivy-covered doorway on the outskirts of the city, her back aches and her feet are swollen in her wet shoes.

Pooja’s mother opens the door. Leia hasn't seen her since she was a child, and the years under the Empire have made her gaunt and tired: her hair is loose, and there are streaks of gray in it that Leia doesn't remember. It’s what Padmé Naberrie might have looked like, had she gotten old. Leia opens her mouth, and, for once, nothing comes out. She tries to think of some kind of clever excuse for being here, a message from Pooja maybe, but all of a sudden Sola is crying. Leia pulls back to leave, to mutter an apology, and then Sola is holding her, one hand grasping her wet shirt and the other cradling the back of her head, as if Leia is a child again, as if she's come back from the dead. 

.

She ends up having the baby on Naboo, on an island lake retreat owned by the Naberries called Varykino. It’s nearly unchanged since the republic days. The stone arches of the house open onto white balconies that look out over the lake, which is lined with bleached sand and a whispering conference of reeds. A light breeze ripples the water day and night. Leia’s senses get more and more heightened as the birth approaches, until she is aware of every stray grain of sand, every bird, every beetle in every tree. Things being born. Things dying. 

Han saunters around, making jokes about how he’s finally snuck his way into the galactic upper class, but Leia can tell he’s uncomfortable with Sola, Pooja, and Ryoo. When they chat in Naboo, he crosses his arms over his wrinkled shirt and pretends to be very interested in something on his communicator. Leia offers to translate for him – she studied Naboo with tutors as a child – but he shrugs his shoulders and mumbles something about not wanting to intrude. He does look out of place here, with his scuffed-up boots and hands scarred from fixing circuits and engines. He looks like what he still, in many ways, is: a middling space hauler and petty criminal, coming from and going to nowhere in particular. She adores him. The two of them creep down to the beach in the middle of the night and share a plate full of sticky shuuri fruit, whispering like children. It’s there that her water breaks, in the middle of the night with her feet in the lake and her face covered in shuuri juice. 

After six hours of labor, Ben is born in the hazy blue light before sunrise. He has a wail like a tie fighter, and his tiny red fists reach up out of his swaddling blanket toward her face. Leia holds him and tries her best to feel anything other than fear. 

That afternoon, dozing on the couch with Ben in her arms, Han asleep next to them, she dreams of Padmé again. They’re out by the lake together, up to their ankles in the water. Padmé’s hair is in one long braid, and her dress is a pale blue silk, the same color as the sky. 

“You’re getting the skirt wet,” Leia says, suddenly concerned. 

Padmé smiles, looking out across the lake at the swaying zaela trees. “That’s alright.” 

It strikes Leia how young Padmé is, barely older than Leia herself. Sola told her that before she died, Padmé had had plans to withdraw from politics and do work as a lawyer, or maybe a writer, while she raised her children in the Naboo tradition, surrounded by extended family. 

“We ruined everything for you,” Leia blurts. 

Padmé turns and looks at Leia. Her eyes are like looking into a mirror. She puts her hands on either side of Leia’s face, and they’re warm. 

“No, my sweet girl,” she says. “I am so proud of you.” 

Padmé turns her gaze back to the horizon, as if she’s notices something approaching, but all Leia can see is the trees and the rippling water. 

“Who are we waiting for?” Leia asks, but Padmé either ignores the question or doesn’t hear. 

She wakes up crying, which is inconvenient because Ben is also crying, being a baby and hungry. Han pulls her close. 

“What’s going on?” he murmurs. 

“Nothing. It’s, you know, chemicals all out of whack or something.” 

“Yeah, right.” 

He twists around to look her in the eye. 

“Listen,” he says. “I don’t feel ready for this either. I can barely take care of _myself_ – hey, don’t laugh, you’re supposed to contradict – whatever, what I’m saying is, maybe that’s alright. You can’t not do something because you’re afraid you might frag it up. Kid’ll make his own choices. We just have to do the best we can. None of that legacy magic shit, just us. Right here, right now. Okay?” 

Leia wipes the tears off her face and nods. “Okay.” 

A few minutes later, Ben is quiet, his little eyes closed as he drinks contentedly from her breast. He’ll never know the Empire. The New Republic will be his world. She has lost one family, only to gain another. _Death, yet the Force._

“It really was worth it, wasn’t it?” she says, almost not realizing she’s speaking aloud.

Han smiles. “Yeah, it really was.” 

.

The next time Leia arrives at Luke’s temple, she’s gained twenty pounds. Her old Alderaani robes no longer fit, and she wears loose trousers and a tunic under a heavy poncho, like a traveller from a generation before. She’s left her office in the charge of Amilyn Holdo, a promising young representative from Gatalenta. Han’s helping Lando out of some scrape having to do with a business deal gone wrong, something involving jawas and a bad power coupling; she wasn’t really listening. On her hip, Ben babbles, not letting the fact that he hasn’t quite figured out speech yet detract from everything he has to say. She’d prayed, almost ashamedly, that he’d have no Force sense, but she’s already started to see the signs: he always seems to know when there’s someone coming to the door before she does, she and Han can predict the weather by his moods, and things in the house seem to tremble when he cries. Still, she’s not here to talk about Ben. There will be a time for that, someday, but not today. 

She finds Luke sitting cross-legged in his study, facing the door. He smiles when she appears in the doorway. He’s laid out an extra sleeping pallet on the floor, and there are things laid out on the floor in front of him: a flimsi book, a staff, a brown robe. 

“Who are we waiting for?” she asks. 

Luke stands. “You, of course.” 

He already knows what she’s going to say, but she says it anyway. 

“Teach me. I want to know.” 

The gravity of the moment is ruined by Ben pulling on her hair. She and Luke both laugh, and they go outside together to watch his students at their exercises. The wind blows through her hair, which she’s been wearing loose, and her fingers twitch to grip a lightsaber she is not yet holding. 

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was beta'd by marvelouscity


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